


28 Prompts

by thoughtsickles



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Epistolary, First Time, M/M, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-13
Updated: 2014-02-13
Packaged: 2018-01-11 11:08:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1172318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thoughtsickles/pseuds/thoughtsickles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The 12th-grade English journal of Stiles Stilinski, or several very juvenile Journal Prompts and one terrifying What I Did Over My Summer Vacation essay. In which Stiles is a teenager, Derek is not, everything goes to shit and Stiles is maybe finally the one who saves the day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. AUGUST

**Author's Note:**

> I originally wrote this for the Sterek big bang in 2012 and then I had to drop out and I am finally finishing it, two years later. What can I say about this? The whole thing is probably joss'd now and relevant to no one. But I read Daniel Handler's Why We Broke Up and something about the idea of Stiles and journal assignments would not let go of me.
> 
> AU after mid-season 2. Underage warning is for the usual: Stiles is a minor, Derek is not.

**Detention Clock: 3:35 PM**

Why is it always Mr. Harris who gets stuck with detention? Do all the teachers draw straws and he always loses? Maybe they grade his lab reports or something, and in return he takes over their shifts, because he enjoys causing people pain. He yelled at me for trying to start a conversation with Pat White, and Pat White is a moron, I was being nice. God. 

I talk a lot. I’m a talker. That’s what everyone knows about me, before anything else. I’m sure you heard it before you even met me. The _mouth_ on that Stilinski kid. It’s useful, sometimes, when people assume things about you, because then you can be exactly what they expect, and never have to explain yourself. If you talk a lot, you never really have to say anything. 

That’s your mistake, Derek. You hoard up your words and they stew inside you, all violent and sharp. Until they’re condensed into a singularity, and you have no choice but to say exactly what you mean.

People used to say to me, “Stiles, however did you get to be such a hilariously witty class-clown-yet straight-A student, the type of hardworking yet not overachieving guy who won 3rd place in the science fair in 8th grade, and yet you’ve never run seriously afoul of the strict totalitarian rules of the school system?” They don’t ask me that anymore, let me tell you. Gil Hocking asked me if I knew where to buy good meth the other day. He asked me, _the Sheriff’s son_. And then he suggested that maybe I skim some out of the evidence locker and he’d pay me top dollar. This is what I am now. I’ve become _bad._

I wish I could say it was my own doing, like I set out to be more dangerous, hang out with the wrong sort, that I was the Ponyboy of Beacon Hills. But no. This is because I listened in on my dad’s police scanner and dragged my best friend into the woods and ran into a leather-jacket wearing liability. 

I haven’t been keeping up with my homework so well. These journals are due tomorrow, a whole semester’s worth. The sad thing is that I’m not behind because I didn’t do my homework, I’m behind because I’ve missed that much class. But I’m here, no phone, no games, no Scott to pass notes with. I might as well finish the assignment. 

Mrs. Baker: I appreciate that you meant this assignment to be turned in on time. But as you can see, if you read it, it’s been a crazy semester. I’m not sure you really even read these, but if you do, all the werewolf stuff is a joke, obviously. I’m a funny guy. 

Derek: You won’t be reading any of this, but I’m still telling it to you. Part of all this is yours, anyway. 

It’s been three months since that party, when you ruined my jacket, and maybe some other things too. But I’ll start at the beginning. 

** AUGUST **

Two days before school starts:

8:00: I cook dad dinner, put it in the fridge for later since he doesn’t get home from patrol until 10:30.

8:10: Scott texts me inviting me to a Last-Night-of-Freedom pool party at Danny’s. I tell him I’m not coming, because Lydia will be there and I don’t want her, or anyone of the other people there, for that matter, to know what I look like with a shirt off. Even though I know they can see me in my clothes and they probably have an idea, in a theoretical sense, of what my body looks like, everyone knows there is a difference between theory and reality, and the reality of my pale and puny and zitty excuse for a torso is not ready for public consumption.

8:45: Scott comes by on his bike and says he knew I was making up that important episode of Mythbusters that I couldn’t miss, like I should be impressed he finally figured out how to google. He forces me to drive him to the party. Well, he talked me into going, I guess. He has talents that way.

9:20: We arrive at party, after getting lost and detouring to Quick Trip for snacks. Everyone is lounging around the pool, only a couple of people are actually in it. Danny, already in trunks like he is actually here to swim, introduces us to his friends from his brother’s college. All of them have the cheekbones of Abercrombie models and look like they’re recruiting for the Gay Lifestyle. If that’s what it looks like, I want to join. Danny’s abs could cut steel. I lie and say I couldn’t find my trunks. 

9:51: I get pulled into the water by Erica, who to her credit, apologizes for being so drunk. Somewhere on the other side of town, you’re catching a scent. I am wondering whether anyone will think it’s weird that I’m keeping a sopping wet shirt on or if it would be weirder to spend the rest of the party half-naked. You’re running across some abandoned lot, wolfed out, half-tripping over someone else’s kill. 

10:05: Someone starts yelling about the cops being here; it’s a false alarm. The hunters will have found you about now. They won’t ask questions. A bullet finds your chest.

10:08: I wonder how soon I can leave without seeming anti-social, if I’m too drunk to drive, if one can ever be their own judge of sobriety. Scott gets your text. I am glad of an excuse to leave, even if it is freaky werewolf business. 

10:25: We arrive on the other side of town. Scott, with his werewolf nose powers, tells me something isn’t right. I cut the engine and he gets out of the car. I stay with the engine running. I take a minute to wonder why it’s always like this, in some dark parking lot in the creepy warehouse part of town, why my life is always leading up to these moments of someone else being the hero, sneaking around in the dark until I get caught. Being useless, being less than useless, being outside the fight, outside the building, always outside, in the wrong clothes, waiting at the wrong door, waiting for the wrong person. And I’m thinking of the time that I was the hero, there in the water, holding you up, Derek, I’m thinking how scared I was and how relieved I was when it was all over. I’m thinking of you, inside the building, and suddenly you’re not inside anymore, Scott is carrying you out, half-dragging you. There’s blood. There’s a hole in your chest and there’s blood. 

I leap out and we drag you into the car and Scott puts it in drive and I have no idea where he’s going, but I’m holding my jacket over your heart. The second time I felt it beat in my hands. Oddly, I don’t hope it’s the last. 

I know it’s a futile thing, holding this jacket here, but I do it anyway, and you’re not conscious enough to look back at me, and it’s nice, like that secret feeling of watching someone sleep. There’s grit in your hair and stubble, scrapes along your chin. Your lips bleed, from being hit or from your own teeth, I don’t know. Scott takes a turn so fast I can feel the car tipping, and then we’re righted and swerving along some other road, your face fading in and out of shadow with the passing streetlights. _You’re twenty-four_ , I want to shout at you. _Aren’t you a little old for this?_

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 **S. Stilinski**  
 **Mrs. Baker, 4th period**  
 **English Journal**  
Instructions: Answer a half page on each prompt, two prompts per week. You  will be graded on grammar and spelling. WRITE LEGIBLY!!!!!

**Prompt #1: Do you like or dislike English as a subject? What is your favorite subject?**

Well first, Mrs. Baker, I want to congratulate you on not going with the obvious first prompt of the semester, “What I did over my summer vacation.” So generic. So childish. You are a ~~connoseur~~ ~~connisurr~~ connoisseur of journal prompts, I can tell. The other English teachers, ze do not know how ze journal must be savored, prodded, aged, like a fine cheese, how ze adolescent psyche is prone to literary overreach and angst. 

Do people really come right out and say they hate English? Is my generation really that bad at sucking up? Haven’t we learned anything from 10 years in the system? Actually Scott would probably do something like that, he totally told Mr. Harris once that “nobody really likes Chemistry,” which is true (except for Lydia, but then Lydia likes all subjects in which she is smarter than everyone, which is everything, so) but it sure didn’t help his D-. I love that kid, but he is dense. I think English is pretty good, subject-wise, it doesn’t have as many group activities, which means less hanging out during class, which is lame, but then it also has pretty easy homework in general, no huge sets of equations to work out, just reading and research and paper-writing, all of which I am fairly decent at. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but last year Ms. Murray gave my research paper on medieval medical practices an A+, so me and English get on pretty well, you could say. In fact, I would say English is very much in the running for my favorite subject, though I am going to take first period weightlifting next year, so I’ll get back to you.

**Prompt #2: What’s something that really bugs you?**

It really bugs me when certain people think that they’re always right about everything, just because they knew about something else longer than anyone else, as if being around longer makes you God or something. It bugs me when certain people go around acting like the things they’re doing are right and okay when they’re obviously not, and certain people won’t even listen when you tell them that you can’t just, for example, give a bunch of pissed-off ill-used teens superpowers and let them run around unsupervised. It really bugs me when certain people think they can hang around your bedroom all creepy and terrifying and hot just because they want to talk to you. and it bugs me when terrible, no-good, intimidating people insist on looking really good without a shirt and touching the back of your neck when they cuff you on the back of the head and smelling really good when they push you into walls. Who do you think you are, certain people, that you can be all terrifyingly attractive all over my room? That’s violating my civil rights, is what.  
But probably you don’t even follow our rules of humane treatment in wolf-land, do you. Probably all wolves are very very attractive and feel free to flaunt their backs and defined abs in front of poor skinny teenagers who gave up long ago hopes of ever bulking out. It really bugs me knowing that certain people can use their creepy stalky wolf senses to read my heart rate and sweat and voice tone, because I should have the right to lie if I want to. I should have the right to stand up and look, for all intensive purposes, like I am totally cool and unafraid and unintimidated by you, even if I know I’m not, and you know I’m not, you at least shouldn’t be able to know know. It’s like a right to privacy or something, in the Geneva convention, I’m sure it is.

**Prompt #3: I got here too late and it was already erased off the board.**

I want to explain what happened, because it is not what you think, Mrs. Baker. I mean, yes, Derek Hale dropped me off at school this morning. I was up all night doing research, and maybe I fell asleep on his couch, maybe he felt bad for not waking me. I don’t know what’s going on in his head. But he drove me to school. That is all. Erica just blew the whole thing up, because she lives to torment me. 

The wandering into English five minutes late thing is because we hit that one stoplight on Brand Street wrong. I hate walking into class late—everyone turns to stare at you like you’re the most interesting thing to ever happen. (Not that English is boring. Melville is boring. But the rest of it is pretty okay.)

“Mr. Stilinski? I hope this tardiness isn’t going to become a habit.”

Erica flicks her hair at me as I head to my seat. “Yeah, Stiles. Be here when the bell rings instead of sucking face in your boyfriend’s car.”

Danny raises an eyebrow as I pass him to get to my seat. The only desk left. Right between Lydia and Erica. 

A few kids have turned around to stare at me.

“That wasn’t— He’s my cousin, and we—”

“If I could have everyone’s attention, we do have some literature to discuss &c…” (Not that what you were saying wasn’t important, Mrs. Baker. It’s just that certain people kept distracting me.)

Lydia shuts the book she’s reading and whispers at me. “Derek Hale is not your cousin. Don’t be gross."

“Why is that gross?” 

Erica leans back and sighs. “Those arms feel good, don’t they, all wrapped around you? Ugh, I would kill for those biceps.”

I hunch over to whisper furiously in Erica’s ear. “You know I am not dating Derek. Stop encouraging her.”

“Stop getting hard in our pack meetings every time Hale looks at you. I can smell it. You reek of desperation and blue balls.”

“This is why I need human friends.”

Lydia leans over. “I really don’t care what your guyses big secret is, but your boner for Hale? Not at all a secret.”

Erica crosses her arms, smug. “Not at all.”

“Look, I don’t… dudes, I mean, I don’t—”

“Please. You’ve been hot for Danny for like, two years.”

“I hate both of you.”

So maybe I didn’t have a lot to contribute to the class discussion. Maybe I was feeling a little vindictive, and maybe I stuck my gum on the seat of Erica’s chair when she went up to the board, and maybe when she came back she put me into some kind of bordering-on-illegal headlock. She was provoked, I was provoked, these things aren’t really anyone’s fault, Mrs. B. We’re just teenagers. These things happen. 

**Prompt: Free Write** (That is just laziness, Mrs. Baker)

Mr. Neff made us go outside for physics class yesterday, because of fresh air or something, and we were supposed to be testing our egg parachutes off the top of the bleachers but of course really we were testing how much work we could not do during one period. Scott and me ended up skulking around to the side of the lacrosse field, where there’s a sidewalk ledge you can sit on and totally not smoke cigarettes, is definitely not what we were doing, Mrs. Baker. 

I always love those places in the school grounds where kids can sneak out and not be noticed for a while, where kids probably have been sneaking for generations. Those places where you can see the butts, the silvery chip bags, littered around the loading dock or the band hallway exit. This ledge by the lacrosse field even has a few crushed beer cans, though I can’t imagine why you’d go to all the trouble of getting beer only to drink it on school grounds. It’s also got a fair amount of Sharpie-drawings, like it’s the back of a bathroom stall door. The usual “For a good time call…” and “Kelly Lowe is a slut” and all that. Someone even pressed their dog’s paws in the concrete when it was wet, however long ago they laid it here. 

Scott is doing his best impression of Jeremy Dunn (yes, we were ungenerously making fun of him, but he’s an asshat. It’s special circumstances) and we were both not paying much attention and I’d just lit up something else that was very much not a cigarette when Allison’s mom, Mrs. Officer Argent, appeared out of nowhere, like a stern khaki-clad ninja. (I guess I should mention that my dad’s hired a new crop of officers) (totally without consulting me, because I would have told him in no uncertain terms that she is the last person I would trust with a regulation weapon).

“Mr. Stilinski,” she said, as a statement, and I was coughing too much to try and make any sort of answer.

“Officer Argent,” Scott said, getting his best puppy dog eyes out. 

She ignores him, which is pretty rude. Kid has the best puppy eyes in the entire western seaboard. I know Allison’s mom is above such trifles as human feeling, but you ignore talent like that at your own peril. 

“I’ve heard you’re already grounded. Hate to think what more could be done, should you get into more trouble.”

“You see,” I start, having no idea where I’ll finish, and that’s when there’s a loud scream from somewhere near the breezeway, followed by lots of yelling.

She considers for a minute, and then drags me by my arm (misconduct!) over to where the rest of the class is. Scott follows, and I can tell he’s thinking the same thing I am. Another attack?

We round the corner to find Erica and Boyd, just seconds down from wolfing out, standing across the courtyard from each other next to the wreckage of a wooden picnic table (how are they going to explain that one, adrenaline, give me a break). There’s a few students around, running up to satisfy their curiosity just like us. Officer Argent makes to haul Boyd and Erica out but Scott manages to get the job of leading Boyd to the nurse’s, and I end up with Erica, and Lydia, who materializes for some inexplicable reason that I’m not in the right mind to decipher.

“It was stupid.” Erica sits down, Lydia next to her, with her serious Tell Me Everything girlface. “He was saying shit about Derek, about how he needed to lead the pack better, and he shouldn’t have— and that I was only sticking up for Derek because I had the hots for him, and I just—I lost it.”

“Do you?” I ask. “Have the hots for Derek?” Not that I care. Whatever.

“I have eyes,” Erica says, rolling hers. “I’m not going to pass up the chance or anything. But no, I don’t ‘like’ him.”

This whole conversation is making me feel funny, like I want to laugh or throw up, but that could also be the not-cigarette I just had.

“This doesn’t mean you’re still carrying a torch for me, does it?”

“Get over yourself, Stilinski.” Both her and Lydia give me the stink eye. So her crush on me ended, just like that? But she’s sitting next to Lydia and suddenly I realize, for the first time in all the years I’ve known her, that being around Lydia isn’t making me want to touch her or throw myself under a bus. She’s just—there. It’s so astonishing it takes me a moment until I can tune in to the rest of their conversation.

“Boyd’s so—infuriating. Because he’s so much better controlled than us, and he knows things, and he’s just so superior. We used to be getting along so well, better than me and Isaac, and then—I don’t know what happened.”

I feel like I’m intruding, like this is a Lydia and Erica-only conversation, but nobody’s told me to get lost, and anyway, I don’t want to go back to physics class.

“Boys are stupid about their feelings.” Lydia says, shooting me what I guess is supposed to be a meaningful look.

“All we do anymore is argue. And fight.” Erica looks down at her lap, carefully dabbing a tissue to her mascara. “I should never have kissed him,” she whispers.

Boyd and Erica? I guess it’s not so weird, but like she said—all they do is fight and try to ruin each other’s lives. I guess you’re not the only one who thinks you’re living in a Bronte novel, Derek.

“He reminds me of you, sometimes,” Erica says. She nods at Lydia. “Thinks he’s worth something because he’s so smart. But that’s not—that’s not why I—”

“I don’t think I’m superior because I’m smart,” Lydia says.

“Yes, you do.” I cut in. They ignore me.

“I’m getting back at him,” Erica says, voice steadier. “He thinks he can get to me by sucking face with Rachel Lovett—”

“Or, you could tell him to cut the crap and just make out with him already,” I say. Nobody is listening to me.

“I could get any boy I wanted,” Erica says. “Any of them, now I’ve gotten hot.” 

“He liked you before all that, you know.” They both turn to look at me. It’s true. “I used to have geometry class with him, back when he was—you know—still on the Michelin man diet. Your gym class used to run right by our window, and he was the only guy who didn’t stare at Britney Mason’s rack. He stared at you.”

“No he didn’t.” Erica says. But she looks hopeful.

“We have to get to class,” Lydia says. “You going to be okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll keep the fangs out of sight.” They hug, and Lydia grabs onto my arm with her harpy grip and steers me into the West hallway. 

“This isn’t where my class is.”

“Did you really used to have geometry with Boyd?”

“Yeah. I’m not making shit up. That was such a good class.” Danny was in that gym class, too. And I’m just saying, objectively, not that I was staring, but his shorts were thin and the view was good. In a just-one-guy-admiring-another-guy’s-physique kind of way. 

“You’re not going to class, you’re high.”

“I’m only business-high. I could still make it through—” I check my watch. “Wow, only ten minutes of physics left. Eh, why bother.”

Mrs. Argent had disappeared, and I was hopeful enough to think maybe the whole thing wouldn’t make it back to my dad.

**Prompt: What is the longest you’ve kept a borrowed item?**

I borrowed Scott’s hamster once and ended up keeping it until it died, which was only like a month, but Scott never lets me forget it, even though he has forgotten that I only borrowed Yoda because Scott kept forgetting to feed him and I was afraid of finding his desiccated corpse under a pile of old _Sports Illustrated's._

I have your jacket in my car. Technically, that isn’t borrowed, because I never asked you for it, it just got left, and you haven’t come and gotten it yet. It’s only been a few days, and it’s been pretty warm, so I’m not too concerned. I almost wore it to the store yesterday, because I forgot my sweatshirt and it’s always really cold in Vons, but I didn’t because I felt weird, it’s kind of teen movie-ish, isn’t it, wearing someone else’s jacket. It’s a nice jacket, real leather, must have cost you something, I’ve never owned a jacket that nice. I’ve only ever owned one suit, but I’m not in a rush to get on another one, you can understand that. 

Mostly I was suddenly nervous you would be at Vons for some reason, and see me in it, but then I can’t imagine you pushing a buggy down the household goods aisle like a normal human, trying to figure out if the 12-pack or the 8-pack is cheaper per ounce, and ohmygod, I’m laughing just thinking about it. 

**Prompt: Free Write**

It’s the third time I’ve broken my curfew. Well, it’s the third time my dad’s been home to witness it. I walk straight into the kitchen to get cold pizza from the fridge, 3 am in the morning, starving, and when I shut the door he’s there, all silent and serious-looking. I would _love_ to have this discussion, at any other possible moment in human history. 

“The school called. They wanted to notify me that I’d forgotten to date my signature on a detention release form. You know, the ones they send home with students to make sure their parents know.”

My hands are too greasy for this, but he’s blocked me in. I can’t get to the sink. “It was due, you know, I just figured…”

“You just figured.” He looks tired, so tired, and that eats at me worse than anything. “I know I haven’t been around as much this semester—”

“Dad, no, I screwed up, this isn’t anything on you.”

“So you’re fully guilty?”

“Look, Mr. Harris hates me, you know that. I was just being a good leader, trying to break up a fight—”

“You were in a fight?”

This discussion could have gone better. “There was a slight altercation—”

“Is somebody giving you trouble? Does this have anything to do with…” 

I wince as he looks at my face. I know he’s imagining me all bruised and bloody, like I came home after the game last year.

“No, no, it’s just some friends of mine. Not friends, really, acquaintances. Just a lovers’ spat, of sorts.”

“Scott and Allison?”

“No. You kidding? They settle all their arguments through handwritten notes where the I’s are dotted with little hearts.”

“Stiles.” Dad runs his hand over his face. He sits down at the table and I’m about to join him when he throws a bundle on the table. My jacket, the sweatshirt, the one you ruined. Still caked in dirt and your blood.

“For once, just this once, could you tell me the truth?” he says.

I want to, I do. _It’s not yours to tell_ , I hear a voice in my head say. But I’m about done with that. Haven’t I had my life screwed around enough to claim a part of this? But I won’t tell my dad, not now. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done, standing in that kitchen, not telling him. 

I give a little shrug. “Scott had this really bad nosebleed…”

Dad stands up with a loud scrape of the chair and walks into the living room. I take the jacket off the table to look at it for a second—to look at your blood—is this worth lying for? I throw it in the trash. 

The next morning when I’m getting ready for school the keys to my jeep are gone from the hook. In their place is a sticky note.

_Grounded._

**Prompt: If you could be any animal, what would you be?**

I don’t need to tell you, Mrs. Baker, that this is a ridiculously juvenile journal prompt for 12th grade American Lit. Pretty sure I answered this exact prompt in the 5th grade (I wanted to be a fruit bat, because they can fly and see in the dark and sleep upside down). I can’t imagine you would want to read what a bunch of seventeen-yr-olds have to say about this, but then I’m pretty sure you don’t even read these, just look to see if we completed enough pages and formatted it right and give us an arbitrary grade based on how much of a suck-up we’ve been. 

I don’t think I’d want to be a bat anymore, but I would like to be able to see in the dark. Sometimes I think I’d like to be a wolf. Sometimes I think I very much wouldn’t. Sometimes I wonder what would have happen if I had taken the offer last year, and sometimes I wonder why a certain other someone never offered, but then I remember he hates me, and I wouldn’t want to be a part of his Gang of Misfit Teens anyway. Sometimes I think I talk too much, and I think I’m real funny, but maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m really not funny, oh god, and no one’s ever told me because they didn’t feel responsible, like how no one tells Dawn Chalmers that her skirt has a brown stain on the back that looks just enough like she shat herself that Jeremy Dunn got everyone to call her Pooper Scooper behind her back, because he’s not at all creative and has no wit. This won’t make any sense to you, Mrs. Baker, if you do read this. Suffice to say that most people never get to turn into animals, and the people who do get to don’t have a choice what animal, anyway, and maybe they end up as wolves or lizard-men, who can say, so it’s a moot point (I’m not sure what moot means, but I think this is the proper use of moot point, I think I read it somewhere. Remind me not to use it in conversation until I look it up first so I don’t end up mispronouncing it, like scintillating, which I once said the c in, skin-tillating, and Lydia gave me the stink eye. Though of course no one can be as smart as Lydia, why does she resent them for it?). 

**Prompt: What was your last dream about?**

I cannot believe in all seriousness you would assign this to a bunch of horny teenagers, Mrs. Baker, unless you think it’s some kind of great joke you plan to share with the other teachers in the lounge this afternoon. And anyway we can all agree that our dreams are fascinating to us but they are generally very boring to other people. I love Scott but I swear if I have to listen to him tell me about another dream where he and Allison were alpacas who climbed a mountain together or something I am going to kill him with _my_ teeth. I don’t usually remember my dreams but Scott told me I talk in my sleep, don’t get all weirded out or anything, Scott and I have been having sleepovers since we were 8 and might even still have them sometimes even though we’re way too old. Though they tend to involve less sleeping and more staying up till 4 am playing Halo. I did read about dream archetypes though, about how we have repeating images throughout our lives that have meaning to us, and some of them have been there since we can remember and some of them are new. 

I’ve always had an image of the woods, not as a certain place but as a dream place, if that makes sense. Sometimes when I’m high it comes to me, a place dark with lots of trees. Like that poem. _I looked at all the trees and I didn’t know what to do._ It’s pretty easy to figure out the meaning of it. 

I am going to be lost in those woods my whole life.

 

**Prompt: Describe a recent adventure.**

Without jeep privileges, my life gets pretty desperate pretty fast. I scroll through all my contacts—Scott and Allison are already at school, being in an enclosed space with Boyd and Erica sounds terrifying. I select the most likely looking name and listen the ring.

“I need a ride to school. Don’t hang up.”

Lydia snorts on the other end. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“I’ll be forever in your debt?”

I didn’t realize that forever in her debt part would be used immediately.

Lydia drives us up to the Hale house after school. I don’t even try to argue.

She walks in the front door like she knows where she’s going. It’s cold and damp in here. There are enough holes in the walls to let the wind in.

She walks around slowly, touching things. “It’s different than I remember.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“Only in passing.” 

“You’ve “passed by” Derek Hale’s house? Like, you were just going for a drive down his mile-long middle-of-the-forest dirt driveway?”

She looks at me like she’s forgotten I’m there. “That’s right, you’re hanging out with him now.”

“We’re not hanging out. We’re in temporary partnership to deal with some things.”

“You can just call it ‘werewolf business’, you know. I’m not an idiot.”

I trip over an old ottoman and it explodes in dust. 

She grabs my arm and drags me away “Ugh, it smells terrible in here. Like my grandma’s basement if it was doused in Axe body spray and wet dog.”

“It’s not that bad.” Your house is a little musty, but it’s not a paper factory or anything. Lydia can be so dramatic. “Since when do you know about werewolf stuff?”

“Do you think I’m an actual idiot? God, anyone with half a brain and an internet connection could figure you bozos out. Your boyfriend’s not exactly subtle. You really don’t think it smells, do you?” She screwed up her face. “I bet you even like his B.O.”

“He’s not my boyfriend, and I don’t like it. But it’s not, you know, offensive.”

“You’re so gone. It’s disgusting. I bet I could do my whole chemistry project on your pathetic reaction to pheromones.” Whatever. I’ve seen Lydia when she thinks nobody’s looking and doesn’t shrug off Jackson’s lacrosse-sweaty arm. 

“Why didn’t you say anything—” I start.

“I don’t want any part of your stupid plans. But Allison told me you were acting weird, and we decided we should help you. And Allison’s busy with her gun-nut family right now, so you’ve got me.”

All of the ways I’d imagined hearing Lydia say that, and this wasn’t exactly in the top ten.

“What do I need help with?”

“Your hopeless crush.”

“Are you finally going to let me take you out to dinner? Because I can’t drive right now, and also I can’t pay for anything.”

Lydia rolls her eyes. “Your crush on tall, dark, and furry.”

“I do not have a crush on Derek.” _Crush_. What a stupid, sixteen-year-old word.

“Even if you don’t think I can tell, Erica knows when your heartrate goes up.”

“Since when are you and Erica besties?”

“I meet her in the girls’ bathroom and we swap tampons and talk about you.”

I’m not going to dignify her sarcasm with an answer. 

The wind blows and the place seems to shiver a little bit. Damn, I don’t know how you stayed here for months. This place would be so beyond creepy after dark. There’s not much evidence that anybody used to live here. No recent-looking furniture, no dishes in the kitchen, just an old fork with the tines all bent sticking in a crack in the counter. 

“Derek hates me. He threatens me with bodily harm.”

“Erica says he gets all weird about you.”

Whatever that’s supposed to mean. 

The sound of another car coming up the drive growls through the house. Lydia seems herself again.

“Just another stupid boy,” she mutters under her breath. I have a feeling she’s not talking to me.

“We should probably get out of here.” 

It’s a police cruiser pulling up, and for a second I think it’s my dad, and I don’t know if I’m pissed or scared or glad. But it’s not him, it’s Allison’s mom. Officer Argent, somehow even more terrifying with the uniform.

“You kids know this is private property?” she says.

I almost laugh at her, because she could never compare to your performance. 

“Sorry, officer, we got lost.” Lydia smiles sweetly, like she’s a helpless ditz. “My phone is dead and we thought there might be one inside.”

Mrs. Argent lets Lydia look up a map on her phone. I didn’t tell you we’d gone to your house, or that Mrs. Argent had shown up. In the face of everything else, it didn’t seem important. 

** Detention Clock: 3:51 PM **

I’ve been watching the time tick across the big analog clock, the black and white ones they always have in classrooms like the school is trying to prove their own point about needing to be able to tell real time, not just look at some neon digital face. Erica is reading some book that’s missing a cover. I value my life enough not to ask what it is.

It was a cool day in September when Laura walked out on you. I know because that was the day I found out about my mom’s cancer, and I remember so clearly standing in the police station while she told my dad, the two of us back from a routine check-up at the doctor’s. Of course she told us there were more tests to be run, and it wasn’t conclusive, and all that. I was old enough to know that she was just doing that thing grown-ups do to try and make things better by talking a lot in a calm voice. 

Laura came into the police office that afternoon to get a form from child services. I didn’t know that then, I just noticed her because she had a shiny ponytail that swished when she walked, and she noticed that I looked sad and gave me a piece of chocolate she’d had in her purse. The deputy on duty at the front desk told her she’d need to make a formal meeting, and that it’d probably take a couple of days, and Laura started crying. I got her a tissue from the box on the desk and offered her a piece of her chocolate back, I remember feeling very grown-up for looking out for her, when I had my own problems to deal with. 

She had muscled forearms, more delicate than yours, but with the same dark hair, and she cried like a little kid, all sloppy and snotty and in big heaving gasps; she couldn’t even speak for a few minutes. She finally blew her nose loudly and smiled at me.

“It’s too much,” she said, and I nodded, because I knew exactly what she meant.

The deputy was flustered and unhelpful, and retreated to behind the desk to make some calls and look busy. 

You probably fought a lot with her, I imagine. You wish now you had made more of an effort, but at the time you were angry and grieving and lashed out at her for still being there when everything else was falling apart. She kept you from dropping out of school, and she dreamed of colleges far away, with broad-lawned campuses and tame trees. She would have had to fight, my dad told me, she would have had to plead her case to keep you, her only being 18. She cried herself to sleep most nights, and felt even worse in the morning. There was a lot of money left, and that made it even worse, in a way, knowing that she could buy anything except what she really needed. She had never listened to the family much either, and found herself in charge of teaching a werewolf just emerging from puberty how to control his powers. You’d been close, the two of you, and then you weren’t, and she had to be the responsible one, and she hated you sometimes. And when she finally went home without you, flew back home from New York with just a few words about where she was going, you didn’t even ask why, really, because you thought maybe without her you’d finally be free of your past.

And she turned up dead and you flew back to bury her, and you wanted to cry but you’d twisted all that out of you, holding on to your anger to keep you steady, and the last piece of you unburnt by grief shriveled up into something black and ashy.


	2. SEPTEMBER

**Prompt: Choose a poem from your textbook and write an analysis.**

_The woods are lovely, dark and deep_  
 _But I have promises to keep_  
 _And miles to go before I sleep,  
_ _And miles to go before I sleep._

We studied this same poem way back in the 6th grade, and I remember Mrs. Johnson gave some long talk on alliteration and repetition which I was too busy being distracted by Lydia’s tights (sheer with the slightest bit of shimmer, and you could see her skin underneath, including the top of her knee with that one freckle—you know the one I mean) to pay much attention to, but I always thought Frost probably just had a deadline and couldn’t think of another line to follow his last one, so he just repeated it, and now everyone thinks it’s so brilliant. I chose that poem to memorize that year, which I thought was so smart because it’s repeating, you know, less lines to learn, but I screwed it up on the test and wrote “The woods are lonely” instead of “lovely”, which is only one letter off. Mrs. Johnson didn’t mark any points off for it, just circled the “n” and told me to see her after class. 

I think she was worried about me. I didn’t know at the time, but a lot of people knew what was going on with Mom. We shaved our heads together that summer, right before the chemo, and by the next she was gone. I was such a terrible kid in middle school, always mouthing off to teachers, getting into fights (mostly losing), and I don’t think they really knew what to do with me. That was the first time I wasn’t in classes with Scott, I was on a whole different floor of the building, and we didn’t even have the same lunch period. Lydia was the only one who really knew who I was anymore, even if she was dismissive of me, she at least occasionally talked to me. And she didn’t treat me different after that summer, she didn’t get this look everyone else got—like they were pitying me and feeling a little bad for making fun of me all the time—she was one of the few to look me in the eye, and she carried on treating me somewhere between an annoyance and a tolerated acquaintance. 

I never let my hair grow out after that.

** Detention Clock: 4:12 PM  **

Moody Bluegrass was my mom’s favorite band. She had all their records, on vinyl, because she didn’t believe in the new technology, wouldn’t even let Dad buy her a cassette player for the jeep. “Nights in White Satin” was her favorite, because it was her and Dad’s “song,” she said. (I walked in on them slow-dancing to it once and screamed ‘ewww’ and then they both chased me around the house and kissed in front of me and I pretended to retch). My favorite was “In Your Wildest Dreams” because it had a good beat to dance to, when Dad was on a late shift and we put our fuzziest socks on and slid around on the hardwood floor. I didn’t even listen much to the lyrics. 

_Once upon a time, once when you were mine…_

I always skip it when I listen to the record now. I’ve memorized exactly where to pick up the needle. I don’t walk out of my way to avoid seeing our booth at Litton’s through the window on Main Street anymore, and I don’t avoid the corner of the backyard because her flowers are there. But that song—I can’t handle it. The brightness, the stupid twangy bass, that earnest synth sound, the cheery singing—

_I wonder where you are, I wonder if you think about me…_

It wasn’t the song, not really. It was the song plus everything. It was having to walk to school today for like an hour because no one was answering their phone and I still hadn’t regained jeep privileges. It was the look on my dad’s face as I lied to him last night, the realization that once again I’d forgotten my calc homework and my C was dangerously close to a D, the look on your face when you blew me off, casually dismissive, like I was nothing. 

How Mrs. Baker played that song on this day—it’s one of the great moments in bad timing. It’s not even that famous, and usually for journal-time music we get jazz standards or other things she’s deemed “calming.” But today it was the Moody Blues, and when Erica walked in late and sat behind me to stick her finger in my ear, well, I lost it a little.  
The number one rule of decent manhood is never hit a girl, but I hit Erica. I’d do it again. I think that rule is stupid and chivalrous and Erica will probably back me up on that, once she stops hating me. But for now we’re sitting here watching the clock, and Erica could rival Lydia for her looks of disdain. 

**Prompt: Free Write**

You gather up the pack on a Tuesday night. “I caught a scent. I think there’s other wolves. A whole pack. We need to figure out where they’re hiding out.”

There’s more than one trail to follow, so we split up, Erica and Boyd, Scott and Isaac, and I get stuck with you by default, just like being chosen last for teams in gym class.

We go in your car—I am disappointed you don’t stick your head out the window, like Scott does, but I guess you’re too cool for that—and we follow the scent to Third Street, to the shopping center with the Chinese takeout and the Korean laundromat. We follow it into the laundromat, thankfully closed, and down the steps in the back.

The basement of the laundromat is not as creepy as one might expect. There’s some light coming in from the little aboveground windows, and the twisting pipes are silent, with no drips. 

The smell of fabric softener and dryer exhale, damp socks and detergent—it reminds me of my mom. She used to do the laundry on Sunday afternoons, and if it was the summer she’d enlist me to help hang the sheet on the line in the backyard, and half the time I dropped the edges in the dirt and we’d have to do them over. She put the record player on and opened the window, so the sound from the den drifted into the backyard, old classics from the sixties that she remembered her parents listening to, and we sang along, _sugar pie honey bunch…_

I said as much to you. (It was the dryer fumes, they were making me woozy.) (I may have sung.)

When you replied you spoke so softly, it was like a whole different person. “My mom hated doing laundry.”

I waited for you to continue, but you swallowed like your throat was locked, and I figured you’d said as much as you were going to—

“She was funny. She’d like you.” And there was one of your smiles, just a little one, but bright enough to stun.

And you were moving my way, and I moved forward to meet you—

It’s always easy to figure out clues in TV and games and things. When something is oddly detailed—like the only brick in the bazaar that’s clear-cut from the wall—you know it’s going to be the one that’s hiding the key to the prince’s chest. When a character picks up a paperweight, you know it’s going to turn out to belong to the serial killer and be hiding a microphone inside. In real life, all the walls have bricks, and you pick up a lot of things. So I know it was dumb, but we didn’t think anything about the new inspection certificate on the wall, dated just two days ago. Scents get lost all the time, you said, and the one Scott and Isaac followed was a lot more promising, leading to an old shed in the woods. Probably someone just did some laundry, and there were no suspicious employees, and anyway we all thought it was some new pack. The scents were clear. 

 

**Prompt: What is the worst thing parents can do to their children?**

Die. 

Sorry if you wanted a full page for that.

 

**Prompt: When might it be bad to be honest?**

I haven’t slept since yesterday, and that’s not unusual, but I wasn’t kept up by research or homework or video games, as you well know. I won’t give you the satisfaction of calling, or texting, or whatever, even though I really want to call and yell at you, or even drive to your house and yell at you, I spent all last night envisioning all the different things I would yell at you about. But this is an instance when it is bad to be honest, oh ho ho, what a perfect journal topic for today, the day after you kissed me. It wasn’t that great of a kiss, I know I don’t have a lot of data to compare it to, but I’m pretty sure a great kiss is more than a brief hard close-mouthed press of lips, and then a backing away looking really pissed off, like it was my fault, like I seduced you with my waving spaghetti arms and awkward shuffling feet. Stupid Sexy Stiles, maybe I become suddenly irresistible after midnight, like Cinderella of the shapeshifters. But you could have got out of it gracefully, you know, you could have made any excuse—you tripped onto my face, you were under the spell of some magical wolf-libido-increasing drug, you didn’t have to keep repeating that I was young, like I don’t already know that, that you’re sorry, as if kissing me was so terrible you had all these momentous regrets about it. 

You could have just left it. Giving me a brief little taste of your secrets, telling me something of your mom, something for me to hoard away that nobody else knew about you. You could have let me have that, but you had to ruin it by kissing me when you didn’t really mean it. I couldn’t sleep and I hate you, but I’m not going to be honest about it. You won’t get the truth from me, not even with your werewolf super-senses. Everything is A-OK, watch me the next time I have to talk to you, cool and collected, nothing at all is going on with us, nothing happened at all.

**Prompt: What is the last thing you ate?**

Quick Trip “Hole Bunches.” Did you ever have to read Jane Eyre in school, Derek? Not everybody has to, I know I almost avoided it by getting Mr. Gibson for sophomore English but then at the last minute he had to resign to “spend more time with his family” and spend less time with the new guidance counselor, if you know what I mean, so we got Ms. Parker, who had a definite hard-on for gothic lit. And not that I actually read most of the books we’re “assigned” to read, but I used to have to ride the bus (before me and my baby joined in holy cartrimony when I was sixteen) and I got bored and it was the only thing in my bag that wasn’t a textbook. And it is actually kind of entertaining if you get past the beginning part where it is just orphanage whining and Helen (ugh Helen nobody likes you shut up). I mean, Mr. Rochester is an asshole, don’t get me wrong. But Jane gets that he’s an asshole. I think that’s what makes it different from all those “paranormal romances” that think they’re being Bronte-esque or whatever now. Jane doesn’t like him because he’s an asshole, she likes him because she sees all the parts of him that aren’t assholes, and finds that she can bring out those non-asshole parts, and enjoys having the power over someone. I bring this up with the hole bunches because it’s the most disgusting name for a food item ever (so of course I had to try them) and because in fact hole bunches are really just cheap donuts, and not the good kind, the gross kind where, instead of that pleasing “I just had junk food and it was fattening but awesome” feeling, you just want to apologize sincerely to your colon. 

In class we talked about how Jane was an early feminist icon or something because how she refuses to change to get her man, but I don’t think that’s really what I got out of it. Jane did change, and Mr. Rochester changed, because people change, all the time, and it’s not a bad thing or a good thing, it’s just a life thing. And you know, you can call things hole bunches or donut holes, and you can be an asshole some of the time and not all the time, and maybe you find that you don’t like being an asshole as much as you like being not an asshole, and maybe you’d just rather eat donut holes. I’m just hypothesizing here. I mean, Jane did not really need to wandering around and almost-dying on a moor, really. I thought that was a little melodramatic (though it did give us everyone’s favorite Hole Bunch, St. John, which Lydia tried to convince us is pronounced ‘Sin-Jin’ but I am pretty sure she was making that up). And it’s all well and good for people in gothic novels to live in desolate, ruined houses to punish themselves for past sins (which are never as bad as you think they’re going to be, I mean I have done more awful and selfish things to people I love than most of those whiny bastards) but in real life, the pity party has to end at some point. 

So yes, it is maybe somewhat attractive when you’re being all growly and grumpy and sourwolf, but it is much more attractive when you smile, so maybe you should do that more. And try to be less of a Hole Bunch.

**Prompt: What would you do if you woke up in another country but no one could understand you?**

Sometimes I think this must be what Lydia feels like all the time, because she always has to say things twice, first in smart-people and then in regular flavor moron for the rest of us. Did you know I have a giant crush on her, have had for years? I’m sure you do, I’m sure you can smell it on me or whatever. The thing is that I’m starting to realize I love Lydia but I don’t really want to date her. I love that she’s better than this, us, this school and this town and these idiots. She’s going to go away and do great things, rule the world, understand the economy, build nations. I love that she is that person, I love that she listens to what I say even though I’m always stumbling through my own thoughts like I’m barefoot on a floor covered with Legos. She’s like an impossibly bright star that bathes us with her light and we feel such affection for her, that she exists, that we got to know her. She’s a bitch sometimes but I would be too, I am too, everyone is sometimes, and you really can’t hate people for it.

I don’t hate you, though maybe I should, and there’s a lot of reasons for that, a lot of things I can’t fully explain, but I think you once woke up in a foreign country where nobody spoke your language and you’re still wandering around, like in Eurotrip when they end up in Eastern Europe, only you don’t even have an American dime in your pocket, and you keep coming across the dog with the human hand in its mouth and you’re not sure if it’s the same dog. And then you tell me that the only reason I help you is because I need you, and I want to tell you that’s true, but not in the way you’re thinking of. I don’t want to explain it, really I don’t, but I think I should because nobody else is going to explain it to you. Sometimes people are good to each other, sometimes people help each other out, and sometimes there are reasons but they’re not always the ones you think. Sometimes you come across other people who speak your foreign language, and maybe you’d realize it if you just listened.

**Prompt: What do you wish was different about school?**

Well, you are definitely getting more than a page for this one, Mrs. B. 

• School should start later in the day. Teens need their sleep and all that, all the science people say so, we have our circadian rhythms and developing brains and whatnot. And there is nothing in the world good that happens before 8:00 AM. Nothing. 

• Coaches should be barred from holding practices more than 3 times a week, because mandatory every-day lacrosse practice just makes me want to die and also I’ve been missing so many lately that I’m pretty sure the only reason I haven’t been kicked off the team is that Coach has forgotten I’m on it. 

• Lockers should be sized large enough to actually hold all the craptons of books and projects and folders we have to lug around instead of being these skinny half-height dollhouses that can barely hold a jacket. 

• We should have more group projects, and we should always be allowed to pick our partners so that me and Scott and Allison can continue the winning streak of our Chemistry dream team (even though Scott and Allison spend 90% of group study time making googly faces at each other, Allison still manages to do 95% of the work by herself, so I can put up with a few misplaced games of footsie, is what I’m saying). 

• Off campus lunch only for seniors. Yeah, I’m going there. I’m not gonna be all, “oh, I hated that rule when I was a sophomore and then once I was a junior I vowed to fight for lunch justice.” I’m on top now, and I say you can watch me with your miserable faces looking longingly from the picnic tables as I cruise by in my jeep, free and easy for the next forty minutes. This taco tastes better because you’re not in line to eat it, freshie freshman. I see no reason why off campus lunch shouldn’t go from being juniors-seniors to just seniors. In fact, it should just end altogether once I graduate. Stiles needs this taco, the rest of you can eat hydraulicized re-microwaved surprise. 

• Lydia should be permanently excepted from the grading curve, for the good of all.

• Better contingency plans for “animal attacks” my god it’s like we’re living in a cardboard shack in Kansas and everyone keep saying, gee, how weird that all these tornadoes come through LIKE ARE YOU KIDDING ME BEAST-PROOF YOUR SHIT put fucking bear spray in all the fire extinguishers or something we are in werewolf large feral animal ground zero can we at least protect the children. 

Detention is cruel and unusual punishment and is against my constitutional rights, I mean how can you hold me prisoner when I don’t even get a trial or access to a lawyer? IS THERE NO DUE PROCESS?!

**Prompt: If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?**

Harsher penalties for parole violators, Stan. 

In my defense that movie was on last night, you cannot fault me for watching it while I was trying to do algebra homework, because algebra is the worst and Scott was over to study, which was actually pretty great. We always watch whatever movie is being re-run on TNT, no matter what it is, and order pizza sticks from Mechulo’s, which are not crazy bread in the traditional sense but more a fusion of flatbread and breadsticks served with red sauce that is more like salsa than anything. Scott is my best friend because we’ve been through stuff, and even though he gets caught up in his own shit sometimes or he forgets about the time he almost killed me, he still has my back when it counts. And I almost wanted to talk to him about this, us, whatever it is, but I could never think of how to bring it up and anyway we were downstairs watching the big TV and my dad was going over paperwork in the office and that is not the ideal setting to have a serious conversation with your best friend regarding your crush on a shapeshifter with anger issues who happens to be 7 years older than you. 

It makes me think about being old, you know, about what’s going to happen when we graduate and go off to college, and I wonder if you have any friends from New York you still talk to, though I don’t know how you would keep up with them, I can’t exactly see you camping out in the Starbucks with a laptop. Did they know about your furry little problem, I wonder, did you smile around them, were you the type to speak up in class or lead study groups, what did you major in? You have all this life you’ve lived that I know nothing about and you know about everything there is to know about me. That’s where we’re unequal, it’s not the age thing at all.

Did you ever want to change the world? Sometimes I think I’d like to set up a network of Werewolf allies, Friends and Family of Werewolves or something, you’d think it’s stupid, because you want to be all lone wolf depending on no one. But you didn’t have to be alone after it happened, you didn’t have to hide yourself away and brood. Maybe if you’d had access to an intra-pack violence support network we could have saved ourselves all this with Erica and Isaac. I had a therapist after my mom died, and I hated her at first, but she really helped me, and I can’t be the one to help you with this, Derek, it’s too much and I’m sorry, I’m only 17.

**Prompt: What do you like to do with your friends?**

Scott shows up in my window at ten o’clock on Monday. “We’re going out.”

“I have a lot of homework to do.” I really do. I mean, I may have wasted all afternoon creating an iTunes playlist called _Fuck Your Fucking Face_ , but I still have to write this paper at some point.

Scott is not having it. “You’re sitting alone in your room listening to depressive 80’s alt-rock.”

“Morrissey is the 2000’s, Scott, and personally, I think “Paris” is quite cheerful.”

“You’re acting weird lately. You’re saying quite.” He spins my chair around. “We’re going out. I even turned off my phone. I told Allison no texts for the whole night, unless it’s an emergency, and then she’s just going to text you.”

Of course no one else would be texting me. “Fine. What are we doing?”

We end up at the Werner’s All-Nite Diner, just like always. Scott gets his triple-stacker burger with a mint chocolate milkshake and I get the chili dog and a root beer float. I don’t know what they put in the chili at Werner’s—probably MSG or some other banned chemical substance, but it is delicious. 

“You’ve been missing lots of lacrosse lately.” Scott says.

“So have you.”

“Yeah, but coach thinks I’m failing Chem and have to take an after-school make-up course.”

“You are failing Chem.”

“Aren’t you worried he’s going to—“

“What? Bench me?”

“Kick you off the team.”

Actually, I am worried that he might kick me off. But not worried in a ‘oh god what if I don’t have lacrosse’ sort of way. More in a ‘oh god what if Dad knows I don’t have lacrosse what am I going to use as my excuse for being out all the time’ sort of way. 

“So how are things going in pack-land?” I ask. Any topic is better.

“Um, fine. Haven’t really seen a lot of them lately. You pretty much know everything I know.”

“Yeah, but I want a werewolf’s take on it all. You know, what are all the new scents, the high-pitched noises of stress, the simmering tensions between alphas and betas.”

“Dude, this isn’t the Young and the Hairless.”

“You made a joke!” A bad pun sort of joke, but I’ll take it. “I’m so proud.” I wipe away a fake-tear.

“Shut up, I’m hilarious.”

“Allison say so?” Scott gives me a well-deserved kick in the shin under the table. 

He gets a serious look on his face. “I’m sorry we don’t hang out as much as we used to.”

“I get it. Seriously. If anyone’s ever dumb enough to date me, you will see me maybe once a week. Even then, let’s be real, would probably still ditch you for sex.”

“It’s not all sex, you know.” Scott has a dreamy, mopey, ridiculous expression on his face. Gag me.

“Scott,” I pinch the top of my nose between my fingers. “I spent weeks as the go-between for you and Allison’s forbidden love. I have enough not-sex to last me through all the relationships I ever hope to have, and then some.”

Scott gives me this knowing look, like _You’ll see,_ like dating a girl for a whole year makes him a wise old grandpa on his golden anniversary. “How’s the research going?”

I rub my temples. “I have like twenty tabs about pack-to-pack violence among wolves open on my laptop right now. Unfortunately, werewolves? Not exactly like regular wolves. Unless there are parts of your anatomy changing that I’m not aware of.”

“What, you mean like—“ Scott screws up his face. “Ewwww.”

“Don’t judge, dude. Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks.”

He flicks a crumpled straw wrapper at me. “Anyway, we shouldn’t be talking about pack stuff right now. It’s our bro-time.”

We both sit there for a minute. 

“I mean, there’s other stuff going on in our lives besides werewolves.”

I nod. Another long pause. “So, Allison?”

Scott shakes his head. “This is sad.”

“Or we could talk about midterms.”

Scott buries his head in his hands. “That’s it, we’re doing something exciting this weekend.”

He was right, I guess.

** Detention Clock: 4:46 PM **

I have spent a good part of my teenage years wishing I was having sex, and hearing about how much sex all my friends are having, and watching people have sex in videos, and watching people almost have sex in movies. It’s on my mind, is what I’m saying. 

So of course when I actually was on the verge of getting some, I wasn’t thinking about getting some at all. 

Erica calls me up at 3 fucking thirty in the morning, on a school night, and then ten minutes later I’m in the Camaro, crammed in the backseat with 3 unruly betas who smell as you might expect 3 crammed-together teenage boys to smell, and Erica is applying lipstick in the mirror in the passenger seat and smirking at my discomfort. You’re driving, and you don’t meet my eyes once. 

“You’re our research team, Stiles. We have to bring you.”

Scott elbows me in the stomach. “Couldn’t we have taken two cars?”

“Stealth.” She flips the visor up with a snap. “Are you familiar with the concept?”

“Why are we going to Piney Point?” Oh, Piney Point. The setting of many a middle schooler’s wet dream. The overlook famous for views no one goes there to see. 

“We got a scent from the pack there.” You answer. Gruff. Not that I expected you would pay me any attention. You made that pretty clear, after the kiss. 

You park some distance down the road and then we all walk up to the lookout. No one here this late on a weekday, just beer cans and cigarette butts. The moon is a sliver, waxing.  
(Isn’t it strange that werewolves are controlled by the moon? Just like women, as Erica points out, though I’m not sure there’s actual scientific evidence that links the cycle of the moon to the menstrual cycle, it is kind of strange that it would be a month, and not a year, or twelve days, or whatever. The moon controls tides, so I guess it’s not so far off to think it controls people. In any case, Erica’s obsession with periods is not something I ever wish to discuss in detail, though she says that’s because the patriarchy has instilled a sense of discomfort in me for all things related to women’s sexuality.)

We all get out and tramp around for a while. You’re looking pissed off and confused.

“How is it already gone? It was just here this afternoon.”

“Maybe it rained or something?” I offer.

You look at me with one of your blank stares—probably because I’m a moron. But I thought scents were this definite thing for wolves, and maybe it is slightly disconcerting for you to have the foundation of your sensory experience pulled out from under you. 

“Do you smell that?” Scott asks. 

You scent the air and stop moving. “Back to the car.” You focus in on me, of course. “Now.”

God, am I so pathetic? So human, so breakable, that I’m always first to get shoved into the background every time you so much as smell something? Just because you were right about this particular scenario, doesn’t mean you can go doing that all the time. 

Arrows fly out—one hits Isaac and he falls. I’m running towards him before I make the decision, rolling him over to pull it out cleanly. Wolves are shifting, people are yelling.  
Isaac pushes me off. “Get back to the car. I’m fine.”

I’m running back in the woods and I crouch down to hide—that’s when the arrow hits. Clips me, really, slicing across the side of my stomach shallow, but it’s enough to get a yell from me and knock me over. 

Before I can even right myself you’re pulling me up, we’re all piling back into the car and driving out of there fast. Scott does the bandages—I keep insisting it’s fine, just a flesh wound, but no one’s laughing. He wants to take me to a hospital and I can see you almost agreeing with him—I have to draw the line. 

We drop the others off. My house is last. You get out of the car with me and practically carry me to the door. I throw you off. 

“You know, I can heal too. Just not at warp speed. I’m not a fragile snowflake.” It hurts like hell, but I’m trying to be all manly and brave. Not sure if you can tell I’m faking it.

“We shouldn’t have brought you.”

“You said I was a valuable witness! Ouch!” You loosen your hands a little and drag me inside, up the stairs and into my room. I squirm. It’s the principle of the thing. 

“Stop being reckless. I can’t defend my pack if I’m always having to babysit you.”

Like I’m not even one of you—like I’m just some kid. “You’re the one that needs my help all the fucking time. You want to do your own research for a change?”

“I don’t need a seventeen-year-old telling me what to do.”

“Yeah, why don’t you find one of your other great mentors? Uncle Peter still around? Maybe you can hook up with the Argents, I’m sure they have some ideas.”

I regret it as soon as it’s out of my mouth. You swing me around to get all up in my face. “Why don’t you shut the hell up—”

“Why don’t you stop bossing everyone around? What are you supposed to be, some kind of responsible adult? Nobody’s buying it, Derek.” I try to wrench my arm out of your grasp but it tears through the cut and I wince. You pull my shirt up to look at it. It’s bleeding again. 

Now here is a werewolf power I didn’t know about—your hand light against my skin, taking the pain away and into you, traveling up your veins. 

Almost as if you were taking my anger out with the hurt. And we’re left here, staring at each other, and I can’t remember what it is I am supposed to be pissed at you about. 

“Stiles.” You’re shaking. I’m concerned—worried you’re about to collapse or something. So when you kiss me, greedy, like you need it, I’m so unprepared I don’t even kiss back.  
There’s a moment when you pull away, and maybe if I’d continued to be paralyzed, it would have passed. You’d have apologized, and I’d have stammered, and all the things you mentioned before would have come back and reason would have prevailed. But I grabbed onto you and kissed you back, open-mouthed, and shoved my hands under your shirt, and willed you with my mind to stop thinking so much, and maybe it worked, because when I pressed you down onto the bed you let me, and when your hand cupped the back of my head you didn’t pull me away, just guided me along your jaw. 

God, I want you so much. Then, now, all the time, even when you’re being a jerk. It’s not even fair.

**Prompt: I don’t even know.**

I could ask Scott but I don’t care. I don’t even know why I’m writing this to you because you already know what happened, Derek, you were there, and you’re not going to read this anyway, but part of me feels like it wasn’t real at all. The other part of me feels new, unwrapped, isn’t that a great metaphor, I should get full points for that. Why did you keep your socks on? Is it because you have a weird toenail fungus? Or maybe you just were in such a hurry it didn’t seem important? Only now I am thinking that I don’t know what your feet look like, and I want to know. I want more time so I can study more exactly all the parts of you that nobody else gets to see. I don’t even care if you have foot fungus, I have this big mole on my hip, as you are now aware, and my belly button is kind of strange looking. Is being uncircumcised a werewolf thing, or were your parents just hippies? 

It seemed like it all happened so fast, and I want to go back, I want to remember all of it, I want to have been somewhere well-lit and me with all my focus intact, not half-high on adrenaline and lack of sleep, not all in a rush—don’t get me wrong, it was a great rush, but now I feel like something really big happened, like the aliens invaded the planet or something, but I wasn’t there, and you weren’t there, and we’ve missed the original news report and now they’re talking about it like everyone already knows what happened and what the details are and I don’t just want the new developments, I want everything from the beginning, I want to know what it felt like in the moment, not just the hindsight. Your hands on me, I remember that, but I need it to happen again so I can see if it feels how I remember it feels or if that was just something I’ve dreamt up now, re-living everything. I’ve been staring at your name in my phone contacts all day, I want to just press the green button but I can’t, you know I can’t, you know how I am by now, and I think you must be using that to your advantage, to skulk off unbothered somewhere. It isn’t fair, and now I’m the sole owner of a handjob and a mostly naked make-out session in a bed that’s lost your scent and I would just like this to be a shared whatever-it-was, a mistake or a beginning or just a hook-up, I’d like to be a co-owner. 

** Detention clock: 4:57 PM **

You were arrested for reckless driving when I was 11. Officer Gannet was watching me while my father did some paperwork. I had a science project from school and I was using the table in the interrogation room—all the others were covered in case files and old coffee. They brought you in with cuffs but my dad took them off, and sat you down in a chair by his desk instead of one of the rooms. This was before he had his own office, when he just had a desk in the middle of the room like any other officer. 

You’d swerved erratically and just missed hitting another driver head-on. Your breathalyzer blew clean. You sat there, not angry or upset or anything, just the slightest bit nervous, hands folded in your lap. 

My dad wasn’t wearing his usual tough face—he was wearing his Serious Trouble Father face, one I knew well. I scooted my chair over to the door so I could eavesdrop better. 

“This doesn’t have to go on your record. I can talk to your sister, we can work something out with community service.”

You nodded.

“I want to impose on you how serious this is, Mr. Hale. You could have killed an innocent person. There could have been kids in that car. You could have killed yourself.”

You just stared at your feet. I’m not sure that wasn’t the idea.

My dad cleared his throat and his voice softened. “After my wife died—”

You flicked your eyes up. Angry. I was a little scared of you. 

“I saw a grief counselor and a therapist. I know the state must have given you some services, but I really think—”

“No.” You almost growled it.

“Mr. Hale, you and your sister could both use someone to talk to.”

“And tell them about my anger, and my fangs, and how I sprout claws and fur and go on murderous rampages?” Reckless. You wanted to shout it out to everyone, just to prove they wouldn’t believe it.

My dad sighed and rubbed his jaw. 

“You don’t have to be okay.”

You finally looked at him.

“Nobody’s expecting you to be okay. But you have to learn how to deal with these things, or you’ll end up hurting people. I’m sentencing you to mandatory therapy and 200 hours community service. Something like this happens again, and I’ll prosecute you to the full extent of the law. Are we clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

Did you even talk to the therapist? I bet you just sat there and stared until your time was up. I bet you thought they couldn’t help you, or that you couldn’t tell them, that you couldn’t tell anyone. That the words would destroy you on their way out, that the fire would burn your throat up and whatever blackened beams were holding you up would crumble to dust. And you didn’t need anyone to tell you how to deal. You’d been dealing just fine, and the accident was just a moment of lost control, only a moment, and anyway, the anger was the only thing holding you together.

Here is what Laura didn’t have the heart to tell you, or maybe she just didn’t know. Anger is a poor anchor. It’s strong at first, sure, and it feels like it’ll never burn out, it feels like it could sustain you for the rest of your life. But an anchor needs to be a constant, it needs to be something solid you can find within yourself that will keep for years. Anger decays with time. It burns hot and bright for a while, but soon enough it’s replaced by numbness. You keep feeding yourself into it, and you’ll have nothing left. More and more you find yourself empty, where there used to be hatred and purpose. An anchor can’t be defined by purpose, it can’t be a need that will eventually be fulfilled. An anchor should be something you belong to, not something you’re trying to reach. An anchor isn’t a goal. It’s a home you can always return to. 

It isn’t only werewolves who need that.


	3. OCTOBER

**Prompt: Do you like your name?**

Oh ho ho, what a question for me, huh Mrs. Baker, bet you are eagerly awaiting my response (of course you aren’t, you’re smoking a Camel on the loading dock with Mr. Turner, don’t think I believe your story about a teacher emergency for a second). I’m not going to talk about my first name, it’s on your roll sheet, and I had you change it the first day. The thing is, I like Stiles. It suits me, and unlike some nicknames (Scout, I’m looking at you) it actually isn’t that embarrassing for a grown-up to have. Also, it’s alliterative with my last name, and I’ve always liked an alliterative name. Stiles Stilinski, like Jack Jackson (I watched The Pillars of the Earth on Netflix last night because Will Hopper told me Hayley Atwell shows her boobs in it. She does). And it’s short, which is handy for shouting, whether it’s in an emergency (STILES!) or just in anger (Stiles. _Stiles_.) 

I like it when you say my name, Derek, which doesn’t happen very often, but it’s that much better when it does. I get this little turning in my stomach when I say your name, and I wonder if you feel the same thing when you say mine. You don’t, obviously, or maybe you do, I don’t know, I’m sick of trying to figure out what any of this means to you, what this is, and I think that’s not all your decision anyway. You don’t get to define what this is to me, put it in your stupid responsible-person terms, awful words like crush that make it sound like a pop song from ten years ago. That’s not what this is, it’s not up to you to define how I feel. Screw you. Fuck me or don’t fuck me, I don’t care, but don’t pretend like it’s nothing, even if it’s nothing to you, because it’s not nothing to me.

**Prompt: When was the last time you drew something?**

I still have the doodle from last week. Me and Allison in a pile of wolves, all of them wolfy and hairy and me and her human and smiling, co-drawn by me and Allison because she thought it was cute, all of us together. I know how Allison fits into all this, but I’m still not sure how I do. I’m Scott’s best friend, yes, but I’m well aware that might not last forever. People change, people move on, as surely as graduation comes and people think they’re going to keep in touch or keep going out with their boyfriend all through college. I know we’re just ticking egg timers here, just something that we’ll look back on one day with a wistful nostalgia. And a few years from now we’ll get together for a drink at a bar we could never have gotten into while we were here and reminisce about the people whose lives we used to care about. Remember when we were at Beacon Hills High, and you were best friends with so and so? And now she’s married, she has kids, she moved to Nevada, I saw a picture of her husband on facebook.

Is this what it is for you, a constant reminder of how your life was before it changed, something you look back on knowing it will never be yours again, not sure you want it to? Though of course you want it to, what am I saying, it won’t be the same for you. You’ll have more than just memories of high school lockers and smelly couches in someone’s basement watching scary movies and staying out past one like it’s some big deal. I wonder what else you lost in the fire, if you kept your old notes, that paper you were so proud of that the teacher gave you and A+ on, if you had pictures on real film, a science project that your dad helped on. A t-shirt from some nerd club or other that everyone signed in Sharpie at the end of the year, a pen that your crush borrowed once and left bite marks on. It’s all junk, I know, but I like junk. Our lives are made of junk, junk and people and so many half-spoken words. 

** Detention Clock: 5:13 PM **

I was scheduled for my monthly haircut yesterday. I didn’t go.

Here is what I know about grief: you don’t get over it. You never stop seeing her everywhere, thinking of things you want to tell her and then realizing she isn’t there to hear them, looking at the burnt spatula, her fault, and reminding yourself to tease her later and then remembering in the same thought that you never will. You never lose that twinge of guilt when you realize it’s been hours, or even days, since you thought of her. So you throw yourself into other things. You take care of your father or you plot your revenge. And that makes it fade, little by little, and you convince yourself that eventually it won’t hurt anymore. But you have to let yourself off the hook eventually. 

It isn’t because I think my mom would have wanted me to move on or something—I hate when people say that— ”She would have wanted you to be happy.” Fuck you, she would have wanted to be alive. Failing that, she would have wanted to be missed. Every damn day and every damn minute. But I realized I’m not shaving my head for her. Not anymore. I do it for me, and I’m done now. I’m done pretending that anything I do or say or feel will keep her closer, will bring her back, will be penance enough for what happened to her. Life isn’t fair. But I think I can at least try to be fair to myself. To give me the same consideration I’d give to you or anyone else. I want things. I want to be vain, to feel sexy, to be selfish, to be wild, to get roughed up, to break my own rules. To live fully. I think the worst thing we can do to the dead is not to live. To disrespect them by acting like the world without them is not still here, is not still waiting. 

And I know you’re saying that it isn’t the same, that my mom’s death wasn’t my fault, and that your family’s was your fault. But it’s not on you. It’s not your fault, Derek. It’s Kate’s fault, and the hunters who helped her, and the crazy family who turned her into a monster. It’s not on you. 

But you don’t need me to tell you that. You need Laura to tell you that, and she never did, because you never told her your secret, and now she can’t say anything. I think she would, though. I think that girl who cried at the police station would tell you it’s not your fault. That girl who fought to keep her brother with her, who saw what hate and vengeance can do to people, that girl who chose family—she would tell you that our choices are what we’re responsible for. Our choices are where the good and bad in us live. Kate chose to be a murderer. You didn’t choose to help her—not knowingly. Maybe you were ignorant, but that doesn’t make you an accomplice. 

I am only 17, but you are only Derek Hale. I think we’re even.

**Prompt: Do you believe in love at first sight?**

We totally already discussed this last year when we read Romeo and Juliet and it was one of the top five most inane discussions of my life, including that time in 7th grade when Ms. Wozniak made us debate the death penalty in Civ class. If you have ever debated politics with a bunch of 12-year-olds, then you know my pain. 

I didn’t like you at first. You were rude. Possibly a psycho-killer. And you ruined my best friend’s life, or at least I thought you did. I knew who you were, of course, because it wasn’t the first time I’d seen you at all. Derek Hale, brother of Laura Hale, the two kids whose entire family died in the unsolved arson fire that was all anybody talked about for years. Derek Hale, the angry teenager who’d been mean to my dad while I watched at the police station. And you were just standing there in the woods, out of nowhere, all hot and tortured and get-off-my-property. What an asshole.

Sometimes I remember that you scared me, or that there was something in your face that made me feel you saw me somehow, which is ridiculous because you didn’t even know me, and I didn’t know you. Nobody can feel love when they first meet someone, it’s too complicated, but I think sometimes you feel this thing, not love but a thing, a feeling, not a feeling but a tug somewhere, a poke on your insides. _Oh_ , you think, _Oh_ , and it’s not a sudden opening of windows or fireworks or revelations or anything, but it’s not nothing.

**Prompt: What is your favorite room in your home?**

It’s not my bedroom. I don’t think anyone’s favorite room is really their bedroom, because there’s too much of yourself in there. It’s the kitchen. I like to cook. I don’t know if you knew that about me, not because it’s some big secret, but because it would be beneath your great and powerful werewolf powers to know something so mundane about my life. Like every other room in the house, the kitchen is haunted, but in the kitchen the ghosts are happy and vibrant, and it’s easy to remember the loud music and hustle of baking, where in the other rooms the ghosts are sad and slow and tender, which are the worst kinds of ghosts. What are the ghosts like in your house, I wonder, because you’ve got a lot more than I do, and that’s something I never can forget, even when I’m yelling at you and you’re being cruel to me. 

Sometimes I think we should get our ghosts together, and they can bond, I’m sure it’s good for ghosts to socialize like anybody else. You should socialize. I guess it’s alright now that you have your pack, but I used to think about you sitting around alone in your burnt-out wreck of a house, with all your ghosts, and it really pissed me off. You get to be all mopey and tortured and Mr. Rochester-ish, in your crumbling ruin, mad ghosts in the attic, and the rest of us have to go on with our lives and not be sad in front of people too much because that’s being a Funcrusher, and nobody likes a Funcrusher. Sometime you are going to come over and I’m going to make pancakes for you, the way my mom taught me, and we are going to listen to loud happy music and eat food and the ghosts are going to be happy for us, really. You’re going to smile for me, I know you can, and it’s going to be a new ghost I can visit in my kitchen anytime I want to. 

**Prompt: Write a letter to yourself two years from now.**

You know, I still have the letter I wrote to myself in third grade that I opened in fifth grade and it was super anti-climactic. There is not much that I knew in third grade that I forgot by fifth that was particularly worth remembering. I hope you’re not planning on presenting these to us at graduation or something, Mrs. Baker. If by some magical happenstance I manage to forget what it was like to be 17 I don’t particularly want to be reminded when I’m all ready to go off to college. 

Dear me,

You’re legal now, but you can’t drink. Or rent a car. I wonder what you’re majoring in because I have no ideas. Are you still besties with Scott? Is he still with Allison? I bet he is, I bet they’re maintaining some sort of obnoxious long-distance college romance and are going to get engaged two months before graduation, and I’m going to have to help with the proposal, because it will be some huge tacky public production and the film will be cherished for generations of brown-eyed dimple-cheeked cherubic McCall children. Me, I hope by now you’ve figured out this sexuality thing, and that I’m happy and getting laid semi-regularly. Perhaps you’ve finally bulked out a bit and have the ability to grow a beard, but have not actually grown one, because I don’t think that’d be a good look for you. I wonder do you still keep in touch with Lydia and Danny, if Jackson ever stopped being a douche lord (let’s be real, he’s probably just some fratty douche lord now), if Derek is the still the only lurker in your life. I hope you do not still harbor secret fantasies of him showing up on the eve of your turning legal, like some bullshit movie, where now that the age thing isn’t an issue everything can just be fine, please tell me you’ve gotten over that. Please tell me we are not still hung up on Derek fucking Hale and his sad eyes. I like to think, future Me, that things are good, that there are no more panic attacks, no more failing grades from zoning out, no more meds needed, no more inconvenient boners, but then if everyone had their shit together by the time they graduated college there’d be no such thing as quarter-life crises or gap years. Somehow I don’t think I’ll be the one to have it all together.

XOXO,  


Past-Stiles

_P.S. There’s a stash hidden in the spare room closet inside a beachball REMEMBER TO GET IT BEFORE DAD THINKS TO CLEAN!!_  


**Prompt: Free Write**

Lydia corners me before the bell rings.

“I need to talk to you about your boyfriend.”

“Ohmygod, can we not today?”

“God, Stiles, you’d think no one else in the history of the earth had ever been involved with someone.” 

“I think you’re ignoring the special circumstances of the situation, and don’t say ‘involved’, it sounds ridiculous—“

“Okay, whatever, you’re hooking up, you’re secretly kind-of-sort-of dating—“

“He told me I was too young.”

Lydia looks at me in that endearing way of hers, like I’m very, very stupid or just so slow she wants to strangle me. “Did he also tell you he can’t deal with this right now, or that he’s not ready for a relationship, or—“

“You sound like an advice column from Seventeen magazine, and ugh, don’t ask me why I know that—“

“This is an advice column from Seventeen magazine. This is classic boy talk. It never changes. He wants you to think he’s not really that interested and that he’s trying to let you down easy.”

“But…?”

Lydia shrugs. “But he’s really just a scaredy pants.”

“Great. So I’ll just tell him he’s being a scaredy pants and he’ll admit it and we’ll stroll off into the sunset arm in arm—“

“Gross, Stiles. I don’t need to hear about your kinky fantasies.”

“This is terrible advice. He’s not scared, he’s just—“

“A twenty-four year old who still hangs around high schoolers and lost his entire family to a house fire and still lives in the burnt shell of said house. Obviously very emotionally stable, that Hale guy.”

I stand around gaping at her, trying to think of all the ways it doesn’t make sense, because I’m starting to get it a little, and I’m feeling stupid and young and like I don’t deserve any of this. 

“That doesn’t mean he’s scared.”

“Are you scared?” she asks.

Of course I’m scared. “Maybe I’m apprehensive—“

“Imagine how ‘apprehensive’ he feels. That’s all I’m saying. I don’t think you should cut him any slack—he needs to get over himself, and get a grip on reality, and stop being surprised that people are falling all over themselves for him when he keeps forgetting to wear shirts—“

“I do not ‘fall all over myself’—and when did you become an expert on Derek Hale?“

“An excuse is an excuse is an excuse, is all I’m saying. Dress it up any way you want to, it still boils down to ‘I’m afraid of how you make me feel.’”

I’m still digesting all of this when she moves on to the business end. “So all your hairy friends have been smelling this pack around, but there’s no sign of it?”

“Well it’s wolves, you know, they move pretty fast.”

“But there’s no tracks, no signs of any hideout, no murders other than that first body?”

 

“Well… no.”

“Has it occurred to anyone that there is no pack?”

“What?”

“If somebody knew about werewolves, it would be pretty easy to leave scents around, make them think it’s another pack when it’s just a hairball cocktail.”

“But… why?”

“That is the question.” She unwraps a piece of gum and doesn’t offer me any. 

** Detention clock: 5:30 PM **

Erica waits until Mr. Harris leaves for the john and then plops herself in the seat next to me. I’m not moving. Let her do her worst. 

The pieces of my folder are still sitting in a wad sticking out of my backpack. She grabs my notebook and flips through. I can see what she’s reading. The letter to my future self. 

She reads through a few more entries. For spite? She can’t honestly find all my ramblings interesting. 

I keep expecting her to knock over my desk or get an arm around my throat, and then she chokes out a sob, and all I can do is stare at her.  
“Shit. I hate him.”

I have no idea what’s going on.

She sniffles. “It’s just a show I put on. I’m not actually this girl.”

“Okay.” I hand her a Kleenex from my pocket that isn’t too wadded up. 

“But I’m not frumpy-girl anymore either. And I don’t know how to be in-between. I don’t know how to be who I am. I’m not sure who I am.” Erika sniffles into my Kleenex. “I don’t know why it’s so easy for everyone else.”

I can’t believe this conversation is happening. “I don’t think it is. Everybody’s trying on personalities. That’s why high school is such a mess, I think.”

“Like you’re so wise,” she sniffs. 

“And even people who seem like they have it together—even the grown-up people, I think—” and I realize as I say it that I’m talking about you, Derek— “Even they’re still trying to figure it out.”

“I think it’s easier for boys.”

“I don’t know. Never been on the other side. But I know most people don’t take me seriously. And maybe that’s on me—maybe I act the way I do because it’s easier not to be taken seriously. But I don’t think—” I struggle to figure out what I’m trying to say. “There’s not this constant, underlying, foundational rock of who-you-are-ness to draw on. Everybody’s always changing.”

“How can you depend on anybody, then? How can you be sure people will still feel the same in a week? A year?”

“You can’t, I guess.”

“You’re depressing.” She smiles at me. “But you don’t just say the things you’re supposed to. I always liked that about you.”

“I know, I know, I’m your great lost love. The one that got away.”

“The one that won’t go away, more like.” She shoves me and I act affronted. 

We sit for a little while, enjoying the sounds of spring at school drifting in through the open window. The birds eating leftover hot dog pieces in the courtyard, the sounds of a teacher droning from where someone’s managed to open a classroom window. 

She blows her nose loudly and hands me my notebook back. “I can’t believe you took all those assignments seriously. That’s so cute.”

“I used to be a good student, you know. Before I was running with the wolves.”

“We still think of you as pack nerd, if that makes you feel better.”

I stare down at my hands. “I know it’s not likely that me and Scott will be best bros forever, I know we’ll probably go off to different colleges and drift apart, I know that—”

“It’s not for sure.”

“No, not for sure. But likely. But then it makes all the more sense to spend time together now. Life is short, you know? Maybe none of it lasts but it’s still worth it.”

“I’m a mess. I can’t be relying on other people to fix me.”

“I’m probably not the best person to talk to, then. ’Cause I’m in love with a mess myself.”

She bumps my shoulder. “I think he wants it too. For whatever my opinion’s worth.”

“Yeah, I dunno.” My heart’s rocketing around, though.

“Stiles. You just gave me a big speech about—seizing life while it lasts, and making the most of our short time, and carpe diem—”

“Don’t give my own advice back to me.”

“Stiles. Do you really want to have to look your future-self in the eye and admit you might have had a chance to be with that, and you didn’t take it?”

And I think about my future self, my vision of myself as confident and collected and happy, and I think of your hands in the dark, and I think of your weight in the water, the vee of your sweater, and I think of my future self reading all this. And I make a promise to myself. I’m not going to regret you.

Erica thumbs through her phone. “Your boyfriend’s been quiet all day.”

“Like he’s usually so chatty.”

“He checks in with us every morning before school. And at lunch. Wants to make sure things are going okay.” She frowns. “Isaac says he hasn’t heard from him either.”

“He’s a busy guy. Lots of dark rooms to sulk around in.”

Her phone buzzes. I sidle over to read the incoming text. It’s from “Scruff Hotpants.”

“We have codenames,” Erica says.

I roll my eyes. The text is short.

_can u meet me at piney point after school? bring isaac n boyd._

“You think you know someone and then you see all this time they’ve been using abrevs.”

“He doesn’t, usually. Why didn’t he just text the boys with group message? What am I, pack keeper?”

I grab the phone out of her hands and stare at the message. I want it to show some proof of what I suddenly know. 

“It’s not from him, is it?”

Anybody could be leaving those scents. But the inspection note at the Laundromat—the police inspection note—it’s not just anyone. I remember the signature. Officer Argent.

“Erica. The scents were just distractions. Something’s going down out there. Mrs. Argent is trying to pull something.”

“Guess I’d better get my teeth out.” 

“Erica, she’s baiting you. She wants you to come.”

“So? She’s gonna get me.” Erica growls and all I see is a flash of her canines before she’s gone. 

I’m dialing your phone. No pickup, no pickup, and then—

“Derek? Keep your face calm. Be a brick wall, I know you’re good at that.”

“What’s—“

“The scents were fake. Mrs. Argent is planning something, I don’t know what, but she wants everyone out at Piney Point, Erica’s already gone, you need to do something—“

“Yeah.” 

“She’s bound to have bullets and wolfsbane and all of it—“

“Yeah, that’s fairly likely.”

And then a new voice is on the other end. “It’s fairly likely that your boyfriend isn’t the only one with super hearing. It’s fairly likely that this will be the last time you ever hear his dulcet tones, Mr. Stilinski.” Mrs. Argent’s laughing to herself now. “Mr. Stilinski, the sheriff’s son, running with the wolves. Who’d have thought?”

“So you’re a werewolf too? Christ, this town is getting cramped. Can’t even go for a walk anymore without bumping into one of your hairy faces.” I try to keep the fear from my voice. I’m sure she can hear it anyway, but I have to put on a show. For me, if for no one else.

“Yes, I’ve gotten good at masking the smell—not like young Hale here. How do any of you stand the stink? This whole town is like a werewolf locker room. I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. You’re going to put down the phone, Mr. Stilinski. You’re going to leave it on the table. You’re not going to tell your father, or my daughter, or anyone else. Your friend Ms. Reyes will be here in a few minutes. You’re going to get into that jeep of yours and drive up here. It’s a beautiful view, very romantic.”

“And what if I don’t follow that plan?”

“Your very handsome man here will have his guts spilled on the dirt, and the cavity stuffed with wolfsbane and sewn back up. A treatment from the old country. Isn’t it so much more poetic than our modern ways? Give me an old cure over bullets any day.”

“You’ll kill him even if I do come.”

“That’s true. But you’re going to come anyway. I can hear your heart beating through the phone. Just like Little Red Riding Hood, aren’t you, Stiles. Falling for the sweet words of your big bad wolf. Any parting words to your young love, Mr. Hale? You’ll be seeing each other fairly soon, but I know one never wants to be the first to hang up.”

Nothing for a few seconds, and then you grate out a single syllable. “Run.”

I hang up the phone and am already running down the hallway. 

**Prompt: What’s something you wish you’d known before coming to high school?**

I remember when I used to ride the bus in middle school the other kids would play this game of Know-Nothing. You played by asking other kids if they knew what (blank) meant. (blank) was always something to do with sex. It was a terrible game. You couldn’t just admit that you didn’t know what a BJ was, or a creampie, or rimming. I remember the terror when they turned to me—knowing I’d be the one they laughed at, the prude who’d never even got to 2nd base. The only thing that got me through it was thinking that someday I’d know it all. Someday I’d be grown up and no one would ever be able to make a fool of me again. 

Once I got to high school me and Scott consumed porn like caffeine, and then I was the smug one, I was the one who could make freshmen go red in the face from my words—not from what I was saying, but the embarrassment of realizing they didn’t know what I was talking about. I imagined I was some sort of hardened cynic. That I’d seen everything.  


I think growing up—really growing up—is realizing you didn’t actually know what you were talking about at all. Cynicism isn’t wisdom, Derek. Trust isn’t weakness. I may not be finished with being a kid but I know that. 

** Cell Phone clock: 6:02 PM **

“Mr. Stilinski.” Mrs. Argent smiles at me, in that creepy way she has. “Nice of you to join us.”

“I don’t know what you’re looking for, but I don’t have it. I’m a B average—well, C average—student with no supernatural creature powers whatsoever. And Derek, he’s just a mid-level alpha with a pack of teenagers. ” I send a silent apology your way but you’re looking at me with this expression—I don’t have time to figure out what it means. You’re saying something, and I can’t listen right now, I just can’t.

“You needn’t make some effort to persuade me that you’re not a threat. I’m not here looking for a fight, Stiles,” she says.

You grate out words like it’s costing you. “You want to kill an alpha and take over the pack? Fine. But leave the kid out of it. He’s not part of the pack. You don’t need him. The pack doesn’t need him.”

You aren’t meeting my eyes.

“Stop trying to be noble. It’s boring.” She cleans her fingernails on her knife. “I don’t want your sad excuse for a pack, Hale.”

“What do you want?” I cut in. Evil villains always want to explain their dastardly plans, don’t they? And it gives the hero time to think of a way of stopping them. But I can’t think, my head is in a fog, heart beating too fast, and I know it’s because an attack is coming, panic building inside me, ready to take me down, just as soon as the adrenaline fades.

“I was turned by a sad excuse for a monster like Hale here,” she says. She tips your head back and opens a cut across your throat. “Some Omega running around too scared to know which way was up. I’m a hunter. I don’t stop hunting just because somebody got the jump on me. I pick myself up, and I use my new skillset to be better. I’m going to kill you, Hale. And then I’m going to kill your boytoy here. And when the rest of your pack arrives, chasing the smell of your distress, I’ll kill them. And then I’ll release a scent that will have every werewolf from here to Oregon running for Beacon Hills. An endless parade of fun for me.” 

You gasp when she lets you go, the healing not fast enough to keep your head from hanging down limply. “He’s human. I thought you had a code against killing humans.”

She walks over to me. I tense up, not sure what to be ready for, but she saves the knife for now and just grabs me by the neck and throws me over on the gravel. It’s digging into the back of my head and I can feel my blood pumping crazily, everywhere at once. I find your eyes again, wanting to feel you look at me. She’s in the way though, crouching down to grip my face inches from her own. She doesn’t look crazy. Just mean, and that’s more terrifying, somehow.

“Some kind of human you are. Betraying your own kind. Helping them murder and maim.”

“They don’t—you’ve got it wrong—”

She slaps me quiet. “Don’t give me your lies. Their smell is all over you. His smell. He’s been with you, hasn’t he. You’ve let him lie with you.”

My vague plans of escaping to find help fly out of my head. She won’t let me get away. There’s disgust curling her lips. She wants to kill me more than she wants to kill you. You’re just the job. I’m something else. 

She presses the knife to my cheek, opening up a cut. “Humans are not as much fun to torture. So easily broken. I suppose I’ll have to make do.”

“Please,” and it doesn’t even sound like your voice as you choke it out.

She grins wider. “I’ve been watching you, Mr. Hale. You’re losing control of yourself, aren’t you?” She nods to the moon overhead—full. She ambles back over to where you’re trussed and wipes a few beads of sweat from your forehead with the knife. “Big bad alpha losing control in the full moon like a newbie beta.”

You breath heavy and growl, fangs coming out. Eyes flash red, then back to green. 

“Go ahead. Wolf out on me. Give in to yourself. What could go wrong? You could defeat me, kill me easy as breathing. You could also kill young Stilinski here, not even aware of what you’re doing. How long can you hold out?”

The anger you hold onto—it’s fizzling out, fear taking its place. Fear like you felt on the night of the fire—blind panic. There’s no control in any of it. 

“Derek?” I say. I try louder. “Derek, you’re gonna make it. This is easy, you’ve been doing this for years, okay? It’s just another full moon.”

Mrs. Argent shakes her head. “It isn’t going to work. He’s lost already—look at those eyes.”

They’re red now. Nails growing longer, bones starting to crack.

“Derek, do you hear me?” I know you’re still hanging on, just barely. “You can make it.”

“Isn’t this how things always go for you, Mr. Hale? One wrong fuck and you lose everything?”

You leap up with a roar and full-on shift, split-second, and claw Mrs. Argent across the stomach. She flies and hits the guardrail. She’s bleeding and laughing.

You turn to me. 

“Kill him. It’s in your nature, Hale. It’s who you are.”

I look in your eyes—nothing of you in them. “Derek. Derek, listen to my voice.”

“Go on. You can smell his blood,” she says. “You want to taste him.”

You lunge forward in one swift movement, too quick to dodge. 

Shots fired. Three in quick succession, and you fall. 

I scramble myself around and my dad is running up, gun still pointed at you. 

“Dad, don’t—”

You’re standing up, bullets falling out with little plinks on the ground.

I run right up to your side and push my finger into one of the bullet wounds. You howl.

“Derek!”

Your eyes meet mine and you’re here with me, just for a second. Long enough for you to shift back. 

“Stiles!” My dad keeps his distance, cop training prevailing, though I can tell he wants to rush to my side. He still has the gun pointed at you, standing naked next to me. 

Your eyes are still red. I can’t see any trace of the bullet wounds. 

Dad starts to walk towards us, and then Mrs. Argent stands up, clutching her bleeding side. She’s holding a knife. 

Dad walks forward, gun pointed square at her chest. “Drop the knife,” he says, in his badass sheriff voice. 

“Do you know what your son is, Sheriff? What my daughter is?” Her voice is dangerously low. 

“Drop the knife, raise your hands behind your head, or I will shoot.”

She lunges toward me with the knife, and her last words are obscured by the crack of gunshot. Three, right in the chest, standard cop procedure.

Dad runs over to check on me, but I can already feel the roaring in my ears, and right before I pass out I think it’s a shame I won’t get to see you be awkward around my dad until later. I was looking forward to that.

 

**Prompt: I don’t really care.**

It turns out Erica ran to get Scott, and he had the good sense to get my dad. Scott said it was the most awkward he’s ever felt in his life, trying to explain things as my dad drove them both up, and then sitting in the car waiting because my dad had threatened to never let us see each other again if he didn’t. And Scott is including on his list that time he had dinner with Mrs. Argent, so you know it was pretty bad. 

You know, if I could choose how it would play out when I finally was the one saving the day, I would have imagined it different. Maybe I discover some previously unknown physical prowess or magical power. Maybe I used logic and cool intellect, a la Hermione. The fact that it turned out to be just some luck and timely help—it’s disappointing, to say the least. Like going into Pottermore thinking you’re either going to be Gryffindor or Ravenclaw and instead you end up a Hufflepuff. 

Lydia tells me I’m being stupider than usual, that just because I am both strong and smart doesn’t mean I’m not also loyal, and that being heroic doesn’t always mean being the hero. I don’t want to hear that right now, though. All I can think about is how close I came to failing. 

_There are other things than smart_. Lydia has that written on a piece of paper stuck in the edge of her mirror. (I think she thinks I’m gay, and that’s why she lets me hang out in her room while she’s getting dressed and wandering around in her bra and god help me, I’ll let her believe it.) It’s so unlike her, but then she seems different lately, after everything with Jackson and Peter rising from the dead. A little more reserved, still just as powerful in her heels, but it’s less Regina George and more something else. I used to think she was dumbing herself down by playing the popular girl. Now I think it’s just a different kind of smart. 

Dad sits me down in the living room after we get back from the hospital—I wasn’t even hurt this time, just a little scuffed up, but I knew better than to argue with him.

I see the record lying in the corner—Moody Blues. Dad must have been listening to it earlier. I know he usually hides it away again before I can see it. Just a little bit of a lie he tells, but it hurts to know. 

I take a deep breath. “There’s some things I need to tell you.” 

Dad waits, hands folded. 

I guess I’ll start from the beginning. “Do you remember that first body we found in the woods?”

**Prompt: Write about something you’ve lost. Did you ever find it again?**

I lost my phone on the way to get you. I didn’t leave it on the desk like Mrs. Argent said, and then in my panic I was driving like a crazy person and I saw it sitting there in the passenger seat where I’d thrown it and I couldn’t handle it anymore, and I could still hear your voice in my head, _Run_ , like you thought you still had to keep up this stupid act that I’d ever listen to you, and I was so angry I threw it clear out the window. It’s on the side of the road somewhere between Worley street and the Big Pine turnoff, and I suppose I could go looking for it but I’m getting a new one for my birthday and anyway, I can live without a phone for a few weeks. 

I lost my nerve after the rescue, after waking up in backseat of the cruiser. You were standing there and I was looking at you through the window and I wanted to get out and kiss you, but I didn’t. I didn’t have the sense to run but I did have the sense to be wary of you, and I wish I hadn’t. We were both staring at each other, and then my dad was getting in the car and taking me home, and as much as I wanted to sleep for three years and eat the world’s most giant burger, all I wanted to do then was be next to your body again. 

I found my nerve a few days later, in the janky old subway-storage center you insist on living in, like a supervillain who’s fallen on hard times.

I walk in when I know Erica and the boys are out with Scott, having pack bonding time at the movies. You’re expecting me when I get in, standing in your living area waiting, because you can never just surprise a werewolf in the bathroom or anything. 

“My dad gave you a hard time, didn’t he? Did he interrogate you? Swear to come after you with his biggest gun if you ever hurt a hair on my head?” 

You shrug. “He just said we’ll talk later. In a… threatening sort of way.” You look a little scared as you say it. I mentally give a fist pump. We’re so having dinner with him after this.

“So I came over to see if you were okay.”

“You’re the one that fainted.” 

You’re such a little shit. “I mean with what she said.” I don’t say Ms. Argent’s name. “Cause I thought maybe you would be moping, and feeling sorry for yourself, and drowning in manpain—”

“Stiles.” You run a hand over your face. “I almost killed you.”

“That wasn’t your fault. Any of it. Just bad luck, and yeah, you maybe attract a good deal of bad luck, but you’re good. You’re… really good.” I wish I had more eloquent words. 

“I lost control. I shifted—”

“But you got it back under control. I was there. She was egging you on to kill me, but you didn’t.” I’m not sure why. Or maybe I have an idea, and I’m not ready to hear it.

“I heard your voice.”

I’m faltering, scared a little, my plan to come in here and be brave looking less doable. “You heard my voice?”

You duck your gaze down again. “This is too much to put on you, I didn’t mean—”

“I choose this.” Your eyes snap back up to meet mine. I’m sure, as I say it, surer than I’ve ever been. “You think I’d be happy sitting around being normal? Do you know me at all?”

“I’m not…” You look down, away from me. “There’s things I’ve done—”

“I’m not a blank slate either, Derek. You always say I don’t really know you, but you don’t know me that well either.”

“I want to,” you say, as if it’s a secret.

“Good.”

And it’s enough, for now.

I search through your decrepit makeshift kitchen and find a steak to cook (of course the only food you have in your fridge is steak and a half carton of whole milk.) We both putter around the tile in our socks, and it feels like we’re just beginning, even though we’ve been through so much already. I think maybe relationships have lots of beginnings, and no real ends. I think of my mom, who’s not gone from me, not really, and of Laura, and Lydia, and everyone I love, everyone you love. Everything is beginning, all the time. Life is happening all the time, and you can deny it, you can hide from it, but you can’t stop it happening.

We eat standing up and then retire to the living room area the betas have set up in one of the subway cars. It’s just a few seats moved around to form a little circle, and a tv rigged up to hang on the wall.

“Aren’t you a bit old to be living in a warehouse?” One thing I can say for myself, I can flirt under pressure. I’m sure you could barely hear my words over how fast my heart was going. I looked you in the eye, just as tall as you, I’m sure you find that annoying.

“Aren’t you a bit young to be out this late?” You were flirting back, oh god, it was the best thing I’ve ever heard, even if it was a bit uninspired. You were out of practice. It’s understandable.

“I’ll have you know my curfew has been pushed back to 1:00 on weekends.” I pushed you back onto the vinyl seat, knees on either side of you. Who even was I, like someone in a movie. Like Lauren Bacall blowing cigarette smoke in your face.

“It’s 2:30 on a Tuesday.” You smiled. God, you smiled. I never knew anybody could smile like that. I kissed you then and it wasn’t perfect, a little off-center and sloppy but you can’t blame me, when you were smiling like that. And there were tongues, and teeth, and a bit of a learning curve, but that is about enough to be getting in a single journal entry.  


(You can stop the heavy breathing now, Mrs. Baker. God, I’m only seventeen, don’t be gross).


End file.
